My (first) 360 seems to be on it's way out. Playing Gears of War last night - the more I played it, the longer and more frequent the loading times became, plus it'd occasionally load only the low, low resolution textures. Eventually (10-15 secs) that sorts itself out, but it doesn't instill any confidence.

Sometimes Rainbow Six Vegas fails to load a map at all. Forza 2 suffers from the loading time thing after about 40 minutes of play. Splinter Cell Double Agent fails to tick over after about half an hour. Oblivion becomes unplayable after a while forcing me to restart and clear the cache. GRAW 2 is ok though. Heh.

I'm curious as to why these things can happen. I would think the hardware was tested to its limits before entering the market. So, the only thing I can see happening is problems at the production lines.

However, just a few months ago in Wired (i reckon) I was reading at how fail-proof and error-recovering these have become the past years and the chances of flaws being introduced on a production line affecting more than a small number of units is extremely unlikely.

My laptop (A toshiba satellite pro 6000) has served me for many years now. It is finally starting to give its last breath. But boy, what a buy! We are talking about a laptop that for 5 years now has been turned on for maybe an average of 18 hours a day, has traveled around with me and has even experienced below 0 temperatures in Canada (turned off of course hehe).

And yet, a number of them forced Toshiba some years ago to extend their warranty on this model over a soldering problem on some parts of the mobo.

Can it be that production lines are still not that full-proof as the article was trying to make the look like?

It happened because they wanted to be ahead of the game. Another year of testing meant they would have to launch aside the PS3. While I believe the PS3 had a weaker launch lineup, had microsoft not been the only game in town for a year they wouldn't have had a chance to keep two steps ahead as they are doing now as far as software and XBL.

Personally I had two XBOX consoles, the first one got the red rings, I went to the store to get a replacement, then that one died about two months ago, and i have since got a new one from the extended warranty that microsoft first issued. I harbor no ill feelings but it would have been better to get the hardware down before hand. THey say they didn't have enough data on the amount of errors and I can't verify if that's correct or not, but it's pretty fishy.

Either way, whether it's covering themselves from lawsuits which probably would cost them more than the mil they are dropping now to fix it, or they just generally were advised to make this step by the hardware and pr people, but it's a better step than most consumer electronics companies would take. And I can't complain about that, because I'm ensured from the bulk of the 360s life cycle.

when E3 comes around and they see the lineup, peter more possibly saying something (I don't expect him too though, not at the keynote speech) I think most new and old 360 gamers will have nothing to worry about. Maybe a week or so of no Xbox if they have to send it in, but they will get a new one with hardware improvements that won't have the same problems.

It sucks that it had to happen this way. I know die-hard fans that were looking at the statements where microsoft reps were saying these were isolated incidents like it was nazi propaganda. Some people were turned off all the way from the 360. I personally wasn't, but I can see how some fans felt neglected.